The displacement of the “individual” as a primary category of social and political thought — a distinctly observable trend in the contemporary West — is an infallible sign of civilizational despair. The nexus of causes and factors accounting for this undeniable phenomenon has been analyzed in many different ways and from many different perspectives: the draining of confidence in the “Western enterprise” after two world wars and the devastation of the generations; the natural tendency of a successful civilization to grow tired and lazy in the course of aeonian time, as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee argued in their major works; the loss of religious conviction and its attendant moral armature, leading to rootless insecurity and lack of transcendent purpose; the attenuation of historical memory — what I have elsewhere called the chronosectomy — owing to a dumbed-down education paradigm and the consequent onset of a present-oriented hedonism. Perhaps all of these factors are coterminous and work together against the sense of individual responsibility for self, family, and nation. But whatever may explain our predicament, there can be little doubt that, despite all our technical advances, we are experiencing something like the advent of a new Dark Age.

The concept of the self has undergone a sea change, as has the practice of self-reliance, civic virtue, moral integrity, national pride, and the commitment to cultural perpetuation. The temptation is to embrace one of two options: unbridled self-indulgence without heed for the past or the future, a kind of, let’s say, bed-and-circuses mentality that has become pervasive in the West; or the emptying out of intellectual and spiritual substance into the amorphous but all-consuming structures of grand collective movements, generally of a utopian nature. I suspect these are only two sides of the same counterfeit coin. The pursuit of the millennium, to cite the title of Norman Cohn’s must-read volume, is an ironclad way of flattering one’s unearned self-esteem without demanding the duty of thought and the discipline of knowledge. It goes hand in hand with the surrender to authority at the cost of what the existentialists used to call personal authenticity. The individual, in the classic sense of a concrete center of cognitive awareness and moral responsibility, has become the relic of a vanishing tradition. The inclination is to identify with presumably benevolent but actually savage abstractions. In today’s “enlightened” world, the Arcadian dream — a dead idea embalmed with the illusion of vitality — has once again assumed massive and destructive proportions.

It should now be obvious that in the name of “the brotherhood of man,” of human sympathy and an oceanic desire for peace, a travesty is being enacted. Pragmatic democratic institutions and powers ready to entertain the prospect of conflict and sacrifice in the service of specific, empirical commitments to beneficial change, or the preservation of authentic liberal values, are slagged as aggressors, and courageous individuals unwilling to surrender themselves to the chants, slogans, and sentimentalities of the morally occulted are swept aside as vestiges of an archaic state of mind. As C.S. Lewis presciently wrote in his 1944 The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Such is the paideia, the method of education and cultural transmission, that obtains today in the West, chiefly in the debased Humanities.

The eclipse of the Humanities, which have been reduced to a politicized hybrid called “cultural studies” in our university curricula, is one of the more conspicuous symptoms of precipitous cultural decline. In Break, Blow, Burn, Camille Paglia mourns the virtual extinction of lyric poetry, “which from its birth in ancient Greece has played so significant a role in the emergence of individualism, spawning in turn our concept of civil rights.” We have forfeited “custodianship” to “deconstruction” and in so doing have violated the “mission and goal of the humanities.”

It is, of course, not only a question of the melancholy fate of lyric poetry. We now suffer the dimming of a long tradition of scholarship, responsible pedagogy, literary memory, immersion in the cultural library, and the practice of independent study and thought — of learning for oneself rather than lapsing into groupthink or being “nudged” toward the treadmill uniformity of syndicate and guild. The articulation of broad-based knowledge and the formation of the sovereign sensibility, aware of both its freedom and its civic duties, even if more honored in the breach than the observance, represent the inherent morality of genuine education. “I am uncertain,” Paglia concludes, “about whether the West’s chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it.”

The schools and institutions that “mediate moral understanding to children,” in the words of James Davison Hunter in The Death of Character, have become complicit “in destroying…character and its attending moral ideals,” by failing to provide “a more grounded experience of subjective autonomy.” One might go further and suggest that such a “more grounded experience” of subjective identity is almost entirely wanting and its antithesis — a world of unselved integers participating in a fable of universal peace and brotherhood — installed in its place. There can be no question that we live in an age in which the concept of the autonomous individual, capable of forming his own ideas, asserting his right of self-determination, and chary of dependence on others, has been critically weakened.

Erich Fromm has furnished the definitive study of the process of self-abdication in his Escape from Freedom, which convincingly accounts for the dynamic of moral and individual surrender to the collective mind. According to Fromm, the identification with authoritarianism is a “mechanism of escape” from a feeling of personal insecurity and weakness. The “severed” personality attempts to overcome so crippling a condition by choosing to “give up his freedom” as a way of “eliminating the gap” between his individual self and the world he cannot come to terms with or enter as a productive participant. The lamentable result is “the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self.” And the choice is paid for “by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities,” another way of describing the totalitarian nightmare.

Fromm focuses on the psychology of Nazism to better clarify the structure of the totalitarian personality. It is typified by a deep intuition of lack, of insignificance and deficiency. Two of the factors that tend to predominate are a slavish admiration of power and the accusation of the Jews as a “race” that desires mastery over others. The contradiction is rarely noticed: power is to be sought as a good on the one hand, condemned as an evil on the other. And yet the paradox is only apparent. Where the psyche is inwardly prey to the presentiment of its own vacancy, one always requires both a threatening usurper and a redeeming authority to establish the conviction of one’s own supremacy and completeness. Though Fromm’s theory is not entirely original — Papa Freud throughout his oeuvre, Elias Canetti, and Eric Hoffer have all in one way or another proposed similar notions — it is about as accurate an understanding of the totalitarian impulse that governs the “lifeworld” of the contemporary sensibility as we can come up with.

113 Comments, 47 Threads

The normal human society is a tribe or a kingdom. In both one knows ones place and any attempt to rise above it results in sanction.

The West brought us the concept of the sovereign individual who could accumulate capital of his own, breaking down restrictions of birth and caste in the process.

This makes people a bit uncomfortable; most people in the world, and many in the west, are more comfortable living in a static hierarchy where they know their place.

This unease with the results of freedom creates the opportunity for power-seekers. To hold onto and extend this power in the west they have to undermine the concept of individual sovereignty, and this they have been doing with gusto for the last hundred years.

It would be a mistake in anthropological thinking to assume that the seed whose fruit is individual freedom was not always present, albeit in nascent form, from the very beginning of humankind.

Humanity is the species whose community is organized not along the lines of the pecking order of our animal cousins, but rather in terms of a centre of sacred/linguistic attention and a desiring human periphery. IN short, and all too briefly, humanity is organized through language and religion: the “top dog” must address the community as a whole, not just his immediate rival in the pecking order.

To reflect on how this state of affairs could ever have come into existence is hopefully to grasp that humanity is defined by the exchange of signs in a shared scene or event, a necessary reciprocity that is both the basis for the left’s intuitions about moral equality, (intuitions, the deeper understanding of which they always sacrifice to the Utopian impulse) and the freedom lover’s recognition that exchange requires social differences and someone taking the lead. Even the most ritual-bound society carries within it the possibility of eventually understanding that the ritual could not have ever come into existence without someone going first in unfolding the event from which the ritual stems. The Jewish discovery of the individual who covenants with the one God is not just the seed of a modernity at radical odds with traditional societies, but a real anthropological insight into the origin of all humanity, an insight superior to the un-selfconsciously sacrificial theories on origins that characterize the impulse to uniformity.

This comment is a mistake in anthropological thinking. Human beings are social animals. Humans do not live like some cats, as solitary individuals. Every social organization (which is how normal human beings must live) is a pecking order. An individual’s place in the status hierarchy is not permanent — moving up or down happens all the time. Human society is structured as a dominance hierarchy (all societies are, actually) and is defined and maintained by shared mores, traditions, religion, language, etc. The broader definition of animal societies is: a group of related individuals competing for conventional goals by conventional means. Success or lack thereof in the competition determines one’s status, but none are born into a guaranteed spot. Leftists want to destroy human society because they feel that they cannot compete successfully in it by following the normal rules (they want to operate by result-oriented norms, as required to keep themselves in power). Libertarians want to destroy it because they don’t accept any conventional goals or means. They are abnormal humans (Ayn Rand comes to mind, in all her maximal oddity) in desiring to exist outside society. Why they don’t all move to Jamaica, smoke ganja all day under a palm tree, and leave the rest of us alone, I wish I knew. That leaves Rightists, who see normal human life as good, and who accept it and attempt to protect it from the skulking wierdos who are always on the prowl just outside the campfire’s light. Yep, I mean Ron Paul and Hussien O’bwana.

The normal human society is a tribe or a kingdom. In both one knows ones place and any attempt to rise above it results in sanction …that’s in space, in time it’s three generations, the length of time that all within it experience one another in full.

That’s why economic mobility is (or was once and maybe future) the hill where we the people built the shining city. What shined is we had shown a way out of darker places –we could make that three generation wheel roll –the point of sacrifice the rearing of opportunity.

Quibble: the point of V for Vendetta (aside from the egregious Bush bash buried in the middle, and the general over-the-top anti-Christian blather) was the destruction of a government that had already gone totalitarian. Of course that doesn’t stop the OWS airheads from commandeering its message. But Klavan’s quotation, “envisions a world in which all people will come together as one to support acts of terrorism against free institutions.” does not describe the movie I saw.

I wouldn’t say “as usual” but I would agree that it is brilliant; this is the best essay by Mr. Solway I’ve read. It is incisive to the point of terseness considering the complexity of thought involved and that is exactly what is needed.

What ails America is not a simple paradigm but a tangled web of strange and unreal philosophies which nevertheless DO revolve around a central core and that core is brightly exposed here by Mr. Solway.

Eh – V for Vendetta was a watered-down, dumbed-down appropriation of Orwell’s 1984 told from Hollywood’s left-leaning perspective. The original novel, of course, was a warning about where the Soviet style of socialism would ultimately lead.

Obviously, the point can be broadened to socialism in general, as we are learning in our own country. We aren’t in that dystopian world yet, and we aren’t getting there the way Orwell envisioned, but his novel was disturbingly prescient. Instead of viewscreens in our apartments, we have IPhones and the Internet. Instead of direct government control of the media, we have a media that voluntarily colludes with government. Even our history is being twisted, with incovenient truths left out and facts deliberately misinterpreted, all to prop up the left’s politically acceptable dogma.

Fortunately, the bubbles are beginning to burst, the 2008 crisis resulting from government pressure on banks to offer mortgages to unqualifying individuals in the name of “equality” being the first of many. The hyper-inflated education bubble of our public colleges and universities is next. Ultimately, the fiscal solvency of the entire country is in danger because of our commitments to programs like Medicare and Social Security far exceed our ability to pay. The death throes of the left will not be pretty. It’s too bad the rest of us have to suffer along with the people who voted for it.

Based on this analysis, one can see the reason for the left’s love affair with even the most radical, anti-liberal fundamentalist Islam: the individual is completely subsumed by the Muslim collective. The Star Trek borg seem to represent all that Islam has to offer: militant, expansionist assimilation of all other cultures and civilizations into their caliphate. If Star Trek were to represent our current reality, the Borg have assimilated the entire United Federation of Planets into doing its bidding, and have assimilated the civilian leaders, politicians, teachers and military commanders of the Western world. Indeed, resistance is futile.
How can we truly fight the Muslim jihadists if our politicians at all levels have been assimilated into the Muslim Brotherhood collective?

This essay, though written as if the author intended it for a pretentious journal, is quite valuable, not for its grandiloquence or its citations, but for this: it outlines the consequences of the separation of the individual’s loyalties to himself and his standards from those ideals that make a free, coherent society possible.

I envision that separation as a piece of two-dimensional geometry. Western civilization was at its strongest when the principles of the Enlightenment were fused to the ideals of Christianity: that is, when individual freedom as a political principle was united with the overarching Christian ideal of the Golden Rule. When individual freedom came to be seen as subordinate to group acceptance and conformance, and “good will toward men” retreated into the abstract as a formless will to “social justice,” the seams on the Grand Experiment started to show.

Of course, that would not have been possible without the unconscious acceptance by so many of the utilitarian axiom: “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which implies a further principle: “The end justifies the means.” But as Emerson told us in Compensation:

The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem – how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual bright, etc. from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end….We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow.

By this law of the universe, the ethereal aspirations for “universal peace” and “social justice” dissolve in the mists, and what remains is only the mindlessness of subjection, whether willed or coerced.

Problem: the Enlightenment was completely wrong. Human beings are not born as tabula rasa, behavior 100% malleable by changing the environment. In fact, changing the environment has zero impact on normal human behavior. That’s why every utopia fails, usually within five years. Brain science now shows that, guess what, Human Nature exists; it’s genetically determined; it’s hard-wired; it’s innate; it’s immutable. So sad — Ayn Rand wasn’t the guru-ette who was going to show us all how to get away with living any danged way we please, with no regard for any other human being, but just another messed-up psycho who couldn’t get along well with others. Couldn’t write worth a crap either, but then anybody as divorced from the reality of normal human social life as she was isn’t likely to be the next Jane Austen.

This article brought to mind a recent conversation with a friend who informed me that her son had been mugged.
He was roughed up and his belongings taken from him. The two teenage girls he was with both equipped with the latest phones stood by and watched. Neither of them took those otherwise busy little texting fingers out to dial 911.
Once again it was them watching a scene as if on youtube or their iphone. Very disturbing if one thinks hard about it.

Here their moral duty and responsibility failed, the ability to think ,gone, on hold. No conviction just a brain dead stare at the event taking place. The mugging took some time, it was a slow process, what kind of watch do you have, let’s see it, open your bag, what kind of shoes do you have etc.. To think these teenage girls had no ability to think, even if one ran away to call. To me an appalling sign of things to come. A small example but one can read David’s observations in their actions.

At bottom, there are too many people. The more people, the more craving for individuality and individual integrity, but the less space for both. Surrendering to the collective is the path of less resistance; i.e., less work. Judging from your picture, you (and I) grew up in a world of about 1.5 billion people; now there are 7 billion. Our collective success is destroying the possibility of becoming an heroic, integritous individual because our institutions — govts, corps, military enforcers, scientific innovators, etc — have to run harder just to keep in place. Your voice is only 1/7,000,000,000th. In the deteriorating west, easy sex, easy food, easy entertainment is much, much more enticing than the integrity of self-confrontation, actually learning something, and doing something that’s worth it. In the end, Aristotle will have been shown to be wrong: people DON’T want to know. Darwin knew that a species’ success could be its undoing.

People want to know and they don’t want to know. It’s a question of where they are at. Most of the time, going with the flow makes sense from a pragmatic point of view. It takes a lot of time and energy to think for yourself and the rewards may not be evident. However, the need for individual initiative and thought is learned and desired when the flow is turbulent, confused, and lives are in danger. Humanity progresses when it has to run away from itself. New demographics will require new ways of thinking and individuals will arise, eventually, to the task.

I agree that population is part of the problem, a large part. Common sense would’ve had a national policy in place of keeping our population at 200 million instead of pretending the wild West extended out from California indefinitely. Instead, our gov’t blithely allows the import of 2 million illegal and legal foreign nationals a year. Our own President has sued an American state to favor illegal foreign nationals – a disgrace and oath breaking attitude towards the law in favor of infinite mitigation.

Thus the mainstream media and liberals generally have no interest in the “up from nothing” life story of a Clarence Thomas or a Herman Cain but express a bond with the weenie who carries a sign that says “who’s going to pay my student loan?’

Having followed sports since the sixties, I’ve noticed that it appears to be a tool of indoctrination for the purpose of self-abdication, or the surrender to authority.
Final say coming from the striped shirts that are not to be questioned. This is especially present in the Olympics where panels of expert judges decide what is beautiful and gold, the eye of the mere beholder is inadequate to make such distinctions.
The NCAA wrote laws (1980′s I think) that prohibit coaches from commenting on the officiating in post game press conferences, unless it’s a compliment of course.

I used to watch college football games in the 60s and early 70s and the TV announcers simply didn’t second guess officials; now they’re all over them. This is how Howard Cosell made his name, by being outspoken and stepping over that line.

I do not believe that it is merely analogous thinking to say that the praise heaped upon the State by progressives is not much different from the feeling of awe young children have of the parents who created them, supported them and tried to protect them as much as is possible. I note with interest that many progressives either were failed by their parents or were so hostile to them as to preclude the early awe experience. The State, for these progressive folks, is a substitute parent, and the attitudes the individual progressive will go through are the same stages as all children violently experience in regard to their parents. In the end, as the State becomes incontinent and addled, its children will limit its freedom of action so that it cannot harm itself and its progeny. The pain in putting a parent down is exquisite for all parties involved as the parent thrashes about trying to maintain his patency, but the child knows what must be done. The child must save itself, its offspring, and any inheritance that is left after expenses. The putting-down process will be avoided as long as the parent has something to offer. However, when the Egyptians are starving, the Europeans cannot obtain government sinecures, the Americans cannot feed at the teat of the welfare system, many progressives will become adults – self-supporting, desperate about the welfare of their children, thankful for what was given them gratis, aware of their mortality, and properly bowed in the face of chaos. Alternatively, progressives who cannot transition into the disappointed child phase will shrivel up and die by the side of the road well before the demise of the State from which they took succor.

Another splendid essay, Mr. Solway. Thank you.
I believe most of the references you cite have become condemned literature on campus today. Not only for the message they convey, but the eloquent language in which they are written. The hysterical mobs of OWS fame are illustrating your diagnosis with amazing verity.
The state of Western public education, today, has eaten away at the nuclear family, whether parents attempt to neutralize it or not. And it appears that this was the original intent.
With the numbers of individuals coalescing at the bottom of the education barrel, it will be extremely difficult to convey the importance of the individual.
But, with writers and thinkers like you, I am assured that all is not lost.

Thanks again, for this mental feast. And happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Okay—and I cannot tell that, Mr. Solway reads law—but, I think, there’s an easier and better way to treat this topic: Our scholars have variously stated it as: “The world’s history can be summed as a contest between administrative fiat and the rights of man.”, “The history of the world is the story of the struggle for rule of law as a protection for the rights of men.”, and so forth.

To my knowledge, the earliest recount of this is in The Book of Daniel, telling how certain administrative officers attempted a take-over of the crown.

But, the history of and the reasons for the hundreds of years—and, continuing—migration to this continent are the story of the very same kind and source of persecution in those nations which are to be left behind.

England’s Bloody Assizes upon the pretense of political crimes are an example; the things leading up to—and, throughout—the Spanish Civil war are another.

Up in Portland, one woman who had made a rock garden of ornamental rock, cactus, and wagon-wheel antiques was told by the administrative officer—the inspector—that, her yard was looking just a little too “artsey fartsey”.

Also in Portland, just after the 9/11 Twin Tower plane crashings, an administrative officer was talked about in the Oregonian for telling an immigrant: “Look, I’m G0D to you; you got that? I say whether or not you, . . .”; and of course, the immigrant was constrained to sit and listen to that kind of drivel.

Throughout frozen millennia of time past, there are those whoOkay, but, I think, there’s an easier and better way to treat this topic: Our scholars have variously stated it: “The world’s history can be summed as a contest between administrative fiat and the rights of man.”, “The history of the world is the story of the struggle for rule of law as a protection for the rights of men.”, and so forth.

To my knowledge, the earliest recount of this is in The Book of Daniel, telling how certain administrative officers attempted a take-over of the crown.

But, the history of and the reasons for the hundreds of years—and, continuing—migration to this continent are the story of the very same kind and source of persecution in those nations which are to be left behind.

England’s Bloody Assizes upon the pretense of political crimes are an example; the things leading up to—and, throughout—the Spanish Civil war are another.

Up in Portland, one woman who had made a rock garden of ornamental rock, cactus, and wagon-wheel antiques was told by the administrative officer—the inspector—that, her yard was looking just a little too “artsey fartsey”.

Also in Portland, just after the 9/11 plane crashings, an administrative officer was talked about in the Oregonian for telling an immigrant: “Look, I’m G0D to you; you got that? I say whether or not you, . . .”; and of course, the immigrant was constrained to sit and listen to that kind of drivel.

Throughout frozen millennia of time past, there is the individual who—otherwise lacking in curiosity and inspiration for natural life—perceive the ease of existence in administrative life as a kept man, and he becomes a bureaucrat, worming so many of his family and friends therein, as well, to form a controlling cabal in any administrative organization, converting that organization into a resource, designed for the benefit of those who get paid, and economically—or, it may be physically—squishing the unconnected individuals—whether singly, or in groups.

And, whether of Daniel, or of this nation’s beginnings, or of management of any of our occasional Hitlers and Husseins, or of any other occurrences of administrative evil achieving status in historical remark, surcease and rectification of those instances requires intervention by a higher power because—through the power of the vote—once having surrendered some amount of power, however slight, to overcome administrative evil, the unconnected individual is most unable, . . . And, in their allowance of lying, cheating and stealing, by administrative officers in performance of the daily tasks of their work, our SCOTUS worsens the entire situation, . . . but then, what else could we expect, for, they are drawn from the people, themselves, and who know nothing better, . . .

Mr. Solway’s work here, could mesh well with both the 1st and 2nd editions of “UNMASKING ADMINISTRATIVE EVIL” — 1998 — Adams and Balfour, and with John Dickenson’s 1927 “Administrative Justice and the Supremacy of Law in the United States”, still a Harvard Law School textbook, . . .

Phillip:
I’m surprised you did not address the nuclear family. And then there’s centuries of “religion” to discuss which has influenced modern man the most.
Our “Preacher in Chief” has been proselytizing from his earliest sermons, and has hordes of converts ready to throw themselves into the nearest volcano for him. (Who has more fans; Obama or Bieber?)
Even though he is the root of the majority of Americas problems at present, nary a harsh word is permitted of him.
Until there is a “preacher” that extols the virtues of Western Civilization with a clarity the uneducated hordes can relate to, Obama’s carnival shall convert more to practice his “religion” of reactive parasites.
As I told my teenage kids; All education is not pleasant.

You know, David…I have pondered some of these questions recently as my country has been seized and propagandized …in the middle of a Socialist coup.

What separates Socialism, Communism and free market capitalism? I find the following items to be the clear bright lines of demarcation.

1)Treatment of the individual.

Socialists regard the individual left to his own instincts as “mean, lazy, soft, craven, racist, homophobic, warmongering, bitter, clinging to religion”…and therefore, must be indoctrinated to march in lockstep toward utopia. Totalitarian “do gooderism”, heavy handed, smug, pedantic, closed-minded and intolerant of dissent…or even debate.

Communists regard the individual as Worker Bees, emasculated drones that provide toil under the heavy thumb of a dictator, one party class. Socialism with muscle, violent, intolerant, repressive, crushing the spirit.

The free market loves the individual…and their freedoms. It will allow any dissent, will engage in any debate, and looks at the records set in the last race and wonders who will improve upon it. It exalts in the betterment through competition of all…by allowing the individual the freedom to challenge what exists and blaze the new path to greatness.

Socialism and Communism are afraid of the individual, afraid of free and unbridled competition, afraid of open debate, afraid of liberty, afraid of freedom. They must, therefore, exist upon the closed fists of dictatorship, blacklisting, totalitarianism, propaganda and slander.

They must hoax, con, distort, their way to prominence. They have to hide and disguise their true intentions. Socialists and Communists must seize power, not fairly compete for it. They must seize industries, seize wealth, seize education, seize pop culture…and strangle the voices of individuals who would not be ruled….and prefer to self-govern.

The seminal difference in Marxism vs. free market democracy is that in the former, the individual exists to serve the state so that the state can wield power, might and force. In this way, the state can dictate what is acceptable and more importantly…crush what it deems not acceptable.

And in the latter the state exists to preserve freedom so that the individual may achieve, surpass and explore all that is possible….while allowing free and open debate, to perpetually test the boundaries of its own greatness and expand them.

What is staggering is that the former is called “liberal, progressive, utopian” and the latter is called “conservative”.

““We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” Such is the paideia, the method of education and cultural transmission, that obtains today in the West, chiefly in the debased Humanities.”

It started here in 1968 and it hasn’t stopped ever since then. Fortunately, we still have a good number of people in this country (mostly in middle America) who believe in honor, duty, country. But their ranks are shrinking and you certainly would never, ever, hear those words uttered on almost all of the college campuses today. And that’s where the real trouble is, in our educational system. From grade school to college, we are raising not only a generation of plugged-in morons, but of lazy, selfish, isolationists. The “ME” generation has been given I-pods and and I-pads, so now they can still be selfish but just a whole lot faster than before. On college campuses today military service is literally laughed at, military recruiters are prevented from even setting foot on many campuses, and the very idea of upholding the the basic documents that made our country great, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are not only ignored, but also mocked as well.

We owe so much to our men and women in the military today. They have decided to stand up for this country when way too many others will not. But the real challenge is in Washington. We are not raising a generation of people that will bring the values maintained by our military to Washington. Oh no, we are creating a greedy generation of selfish whores who go to Washington poor and somehow, magically, retire very, very, rich. Just have a chat with Nancy Pelosi or Charlie Rangel about that. No, if kids today see that the politicians in Washington are no better than thieves, and then get away with their horribly un-ethical and, in some cases illegal, activities, how can we expect them to come to Washington and change things? Nope, we just keep creating yet another generation of thieves, people who are willing to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public. It makes me sick to think about it.

So long as kids today, as well as our politicians, still behave no better than the idiots that protested in 1968, there is no hope for us. We will just get lazier and dumber, and we will simply want more of everything. More social-welfare benefits, more money, more “stuff.” And with that kind of mind set, we will end up like the Romen Empire, corrupt, broken, and, in the end, forgotten.

It started in 1968, alright, and the indoctrination of Americans has now cascaded downthrough 3 generations of teachers and their infected students (i.e., 100%). Last time it spread from Paris to America. This time it will spread from America to the world.

PREDICTION:
The curtain will rise on the final act, when the Alphas call the gammas out for the closing chorus, on May 1, 2012…..it will proceed to the same “long hot summer” as before and crescendo in race war that will destroy the elections.
But it will also, like the “occupy” zombies, go viral worldwide. After all, they tell us in the media that the cells have already been established in over 400 cities.

The general population have become robots, void of any opinions, dissenting or otherwise. This is especially true in the workplace, where so many are treated like children, being watched over my a stern parent. (usualy a PC white liberal) If one is lucky to still be a free-thinking and rational human being who has not been brainwashed by the MSM, so often they are labelled a racist or a fascist or a small-minded bigot. Political correctness has beaten people into submission. No wonder there seems to be a shortage of adults in today’s world.

I disagree on one point, the robots will express an opinion- violently and forcefully. Problem is the opinion is usually a belief, an article of faith, such as, “The Democrats are for the little guy and the Republicans are for the fat cats!!!!” That’s what they were taught by Grandpa and Dad, hear from the unions, and believe with no facts in support necessary.

The VT shootings are the proof of what we’ve become. Dozens of students (the best and brightest) sat riveted to their chairs while a person known to many on campus as a nutjob killed, reloaded and killed some more. Almost the only person who took action was a 78 year old prof who gave up his life blocking a door so his students could escape.

It is precisely the argument of individual sovereignty that I would love to debate with Obama. If I were able to ask him one question it would be “why must I as an individual capable of independent thought and action who is willing and able to take care of myself and my family without government interference or support be forced to participate in government retirement and medical insurance programs? Please keep this about me specifically Mr. President and not about society or the country.”

You are living in a tiny window of time, in a tiny corner of that window. There was nothing even approaching individual freedom until the last couple thousand years of human civilization, and it was at a miniscule burn level until the latter part of the middle ages, and only became substantial for a significant share of humans after the American Revolution. It is still the minority societal system, by far, in the world. (note: it was different prior to the development of civilization, which only started when agriculture was invented and people began to organize into cities. Hunter gatherer societies had a lot of individual freedom…but of course, hunter gatherer lifespans were less than 1/2 of what lifespans are today, oftentimes MUCH less than 1/2.)

The history of civilization after the American revolution has been dominated by the greatest expansion of human capability and wealth, by orders of magnitude, than anything that ever happened before…but also by the most concerted effort to put that genie of freedom back in the bottle that the world has ever seen. The self-proclaimed elites, you see, don’t like the fact that don’t have absolute power over you. Every morsel of food you put in your mouth is a morsel that you are taking out of their mouth, and they will kill you in a heartbeat to get back to what they consdier the normal situation: them as aristocrats, you as a serf.

And they invented marxism to make it happen. Marxism is simply the con to trick the rubes back into their hovels.

It’s working like a Swiss watch. Latest proof…OWS. Promise to give them something for free confiscated from someone else and they will become foot soldiers in the war to return themselves to their prisons, every time

I read your piece, in its entirety, to several of those gathered for our Thanksgiving celebration here at the farm. When I finished, there was respectful quiet all around. I asked, “Well?” My youngest grandson, age 17, asked if I’d read it again tomorrow morning; “it’s a little hard to follow Papa, but I think it’s what mom and dad tell me, right?”

I just wanted to share my pride in the job my son and daughter-in-law have done — it’s one of the many blessings I’m thankful for on this holiday.

Those seeking socialism or communism are for THEMSELVES as individuals, “freedom for me but not for thee,” so they can wield power over others. The members of the OCCUPY movement are selfish, conceited, and would-be tyrants, claiming to represent 99% of the population, on the basis of no evidence at all, as all tyrants do – see Stalin and Pol Pot, Castro, Kim il Sung. They have a disease known as the “gimme-gimmees.”

David, another good essay. All is not lost. Yesterday, a British Columbia judge upheld Canada’s criminal prohibition of polygamy. In his 300+ page ruling, he recognizes that societies permitting polygamy have been more the norm than the exception in human history, and that the Western enforcement of monogamy is the historical exception (howevermuch it has spread around the world in recent years). He defends this exceptionalism, in face of the limits it puts on polygamists’ religious freedom, because he says it it the basis of a free society, and that polygamy is inherently evil from the perspective of a free and democratic society. In short, it is still possible to find institituions in our society that will resist the cries of white guilt that denounce all claims on Western exceptionalism. As far as I can tell, there is more support than criticism of the judge’s ruling in the public sphere.http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/15/2011BCSC1588.htm#SCJTITLEBookMark1111

I believe a world of 7 billion people cannot survive without re-discovery of the traditions of individual freedom that makes modern science, markets, and a global economy possible. So, I have faith that in face of crises that will unfold in the short term, the individual will survive.

I’m a (part-time!) student of a discipline known as Generative Anthropolgoy. GA posits that the various forms of human culture come into existence to mediate and defer our exceptional potential for intra-species violence. Culture is an attempt to solve a (human) problem, to escape the resentments that accumulate, over time, on any given scene, and that thus erode that scene and, to the extent bloodshed is avoided, force a retreat from it “back to the future”. Hence the power of Exodus stories in the Western tradition. In time, at least where a healthy culture exists, a new scene will develop to mediate tensions, among those who have a greater capacity to love than resent their humanity; but it too in time will be eroded by accumulating resentments, given the necessity of social differentiation, forcing another flight to a new reality.

Anthropology is fascinating, but it explains only some of human behavior. Anthropology assumes the culture dominates the individual; and historically, culture did dominate. But that hasn’t been the case in the modern era, especially since the Enlightenment. How will anthropology account for the influence of the individual? Where does a Steve Jobs fit in? Or an Albert Einstein? Or how will it account for those who living outside the culture, who in our highly individualized country can be counted in the thousands if not millions?

First of all there is no reason why an anthropology can’t draw on both cultural and non-cultural (i.e. biological) bases for human behaviour. Second, there can be no such thing as living outside of culture, if we understand the term culture in the modern sense that includes all aspects of language, religion, art, ethics, social organization, etc. I’m assuming you are thinking that most acadamic anthropology departments are concerned with the “cultures” of pre-modern peoples who are tightly bound in a complex of ritual and myth. This may be true. But my link is to a form of anthropology that is only practiced by a select few intellectuals, most of whom don’t work in anthropolgy departments. They have a lot to say about the modern world. A world of individual freedom is still a world where people exchange signs and tokens of what they take to be sacred. The secular is just another form of the sacred; it is not something entirely different. Individuals cannot but continue to live on sacralized scenes that they share with others, however few or select their compatriots on any of the various scenes that interest them. An anthropology has much do describe in all this. The minimal core of our humanity never disappears however radical the changes in its expression from one era to another.

This article really resonated with me, particularly this part, a centerpiece of the essay:

“…an ironclad way of flattering one’s unearned self-esteem without demanding the duty of thought and the discipline of knowledge.”

It is something I have encountered again and again in my personal life and privately uttered in my mind on numerous occasions.

A disdain for experience and discipline, as if to say, “Well, I COULD do that so that puts us on an even footing.”

I have always despised people who put themselves on the same platform using only words when another has sweated blood to achieve a thing. People deserve respect and disdain for what they do and don’t do, not for what they could do or could have done.

Your delving into the depths of the American psyche and your lamenting over “the death of the individual” reminds me very much of President Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech in 1979: There’s something deeply wrong with the American people, he thought. And so do you, evidently–even if you would disagree with him as to what that is. And you’re just as off-base today as Carter was in 1979.

We start to see this kind of stuff every time the U.S. gets itself into some real economic hot water. Spengler’s “Decline of the West” became real popular during the Great Depression too. And that stuff vanishes after the U.S. works its way out of its economic difficulties once more.

But let’s not interchange cause and effect.

Those OWS protesters are popular among our youth for two reasons: These young people can’t find jobs (unemployment rate for the Class of 2011: 11.2%). And due to that, they want to protest someone *other than* Obama, since they are still emotionally invested in Obama. OWS, by focusing on Wall Street, gives them a fresh emotional target to yell and chant about.

But if the youth unemployment rate were much lower, there would be no OWS. It’s a reaction to bad economic times, that’s all.

Individualism is alive and well. You have only to look at YouTube to see all the amateur videos on numerous subjects–nature, comedy, politics, etc.–that individuals have taken the effort to put there as self-expression. Many are better than the stuff you find on prime-time TV these days, all the more so because they’re produced on shoestring budgets.

What this country needs is not psychoanalyzing the American people or American society but a better program to restore the American economy. Just like what it needed in 1933 and 1981.

Mr. Solway is not talking about the decline of the West but the effects of two things that are closely related: Paulo Friere’s Marxist Critical Pedagogy and Political Correctness.

What they have in common is that they are excuse machines for the failures of the traditionally disenfranchised. In other words, it is not a decline of Western values but an attack on those values from within by many who cannot share in the spotlight. Not everyone can be a Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.

Political Correctness stipulates that those players on the bench never be referred to as bench players but instead unlucky, exploited and oppressed stars. The view, values and perception of Bryant and Jordan haven’t declined but been subverted and circumvented by losers.

The West is alive and healthy because reality loves a winner. But Great Britain announced that this year’s immigration is a record high 250,000 people and no society can survive an onslaught of bench players, no matter how impolite it is to portray them as such.

They say: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” I say: “Spare the feelings, spoil the civilization.” People and cultures that are losers are well aware of it and this nonsense about diversity and multiculturalism is really about non-performance, jealousy and spreading credit where no credit is due masked as fighting racism and the hangover of colonialism.

How much more patronizing and revealing can Obama be than to credit Islam with the Italian awakening of culture and invite Muslims into orbit to share in their “legacy.” What a joke.

sinz54, I think there’s more than one grip that needs “getting”. It is a tad ironic, given your comments, that the nation’s entire health care system, and with it the preferences of millions of Americans, individuals one and all, are being swept under the federal rug, controlled and manipulated. More but I’ll pass.

Ya I really love someone like sinz54 who I am sure is one of the Nassau County crowd has something to say. Ya we really need a program, we need sinz54 and his clowns to stay off our back.

I place the blame on the chapel-rats who have betrayed the tradition for a social gospel. My family has been non-observant since the American Revolution. All the talk about religion is a waste because it has lost its power, betrayed by its keepers: Huxley understood that.

We will come to our senses, soon or late, and realize that our duties are to the people who come over our transom, and not ideas that exist only in our minds. Easy to kill people for ideas, easy to care for them when ideas die. The Pali Canon refers.

Exactly what “tradition” have the chapel rats Betrayed,Bob? The “chapel” me and the rest of my “rats” attend preaches no reliance on any “social gospel,” but rather the one and only Gospel. I suggest you take a long healthy look back inside the chapels you so blithely disrespect and listen (a novel concept that) to what is being preached. If its just more popular tripe and a bundle of Osteenisms you’re in no true chapel but just a supermarket aisle meant to sham. My Chapel preaches the true power of God and believe it Bob when it comes down to the head squeezers like Huxley…I hope for his sake he opened the Good Book rather than cast it down. My moral center is fixed squarely on a man named Christ. I’ll happily forgive anyone who hates me for that and I’ll turn the other cheek, but I’ll also have a carry permit and the will to use it if my family is threatened by anyone claiming its “for the greater good,” and I’ll make my peace with the Lord based on that.

We should pay attention to the Soviet dissidents – eye witnesses to the collectivization of individuals into a totalitarian state hellhole – where real people are seen by government (a small group of other people after all) as “cogs in the state mechanism.” The Soviet dissidents knew the smell of a corpse. Our American Marxists also know the smell of a corpse – but they don’t care – as long as the corpses are those of “the little people.”

“As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. [Marx:]“The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange” (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision). The interaction of a great number of producers engenders that “social production” which, in its turn, determines their political, legal and religious notions, and the “social, political and spiritual processes of life in general.” It is evident that such a conception makes sense only on the assumption that separate “molecules” (producers) are identical… We have arrived at this view of socialism in attempting to account for the contradictions evident in the phenomenon at first glance. And now, looking back, we feel confident that our approach indeed accounts for many of socialism’s peculiarities. Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich

“The author [Shafarevich] also convincingly demonstrates the diametrical opposition between the concepts of man held by religion and by socialism. Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

That gives me an idea- tell them they can have their “socialist paradise,” but only if they accept their role as peasant farmers. It’s the old “you-cut-I-choose” gambit to ensure equitable division- any attempt to cheat works against the would-be cheater.

Canada is out-competing USA now on all sorts of levels. Two huge ‘look aheads’, your pay-the-debts mentality (learned the hard way), and –related –keeping your banks out of the rackets, are why you Canadians have been so ”lucky” lately.

Hi Buddy. I was referring to our own stumble-bums here in the Great White North.
Texas, of course is always an exception. Heck, you guys have the grace and civility to let the Canadian River flow through the Texas Panhandle.

That is false: such things ebb and flow. In the early 17th century Turkish pirates plucked slaves from Cornwall and almost 500 English ships were captured by Turkish pirate in the Med because of superior ship tech. Several thousand English prisoners were in Algeria alone and when an envoy was sent from England to fetch them back, in one instance, not one wanted to leave, preferring the greater freedom and opportunity of N. Africa.

Now is not forever. In Iranian Shi’te south central India at that same time, the riches and architecture on conspicuous display could not be found anywhere in Europe.

We are in the moral battle for civilization’s life – the individual vs. the sacrifice of the individual. Living morally, i.e., to act such that one wants to live another day, is where the rubber of responsibility meets the road. The issue of morality is that it is an individual undertaking for the purpose of not simply surviving, but wanting to, i.e., looking forward to surviving.

The collective is worthless in this undertaking since it can never recognize the individuality of this undertaking. Even if the collective manages to keep a person alive doesn’t mean that he wants to live. To do that requires the unleashing of the individual’s pursuit of values which fuel his life force.

It’s interesting to me that OWS wants to destroy individuality, but they have no passion for building anything. Wanting to destroy does not equal wanting to live – and this is the Achilles heel of all of the collectivist talk now being offered. It is no mistake that all collectivist undertakings from a state on down to a tribe cannot keep up once the individual grasped what it was to tap his moral power. That is the great lesson of the United States, which we are only beginning to understand, that is up to us to teach the world.

One more thing: Most of what people think is morality is for the purpose of maintaining the cohesiveness of the group and depends on fear and hope to keep in existence. Again fear and the destruction of the cause of fear (other people’s judgment that you are not living right) all in the name of hope is not the same as pursuing values. Pursuing values is the lesson we must learn. Once you get on this track, alienation and all the maladies of existentialism and postmodernism disappear. Ultimately what happens is that a person gives up being a victim of life.

It seems to me that one of the problems here is that many “individuals” appear to value helping others or even humanity as a whole more than or as an inherent part of their individual accomplishments. On PJM, the meme is that people do this only to gain power over others, but that is clearly not the only reason. Yes, there may be people who rise to the top of such groups who want to/have to become power brokers, but they “compete” with others to get those positions.

Also, if a particular individual decides that his/her best shot at economic success is being in a union, and even manipulating a pension system, does that make him any less an “individual?”

Clearly people exist both as individuals and as part of a group, or a number of groups. Maybe someone could explain how people have fewer choices as individuals, now, than let’s say 100 or 200 years ago. Frankly, I think a lot of folks here spin their wheels griping about loss of individual rights, when actually there are probably more choices open to people now than ever before, but that does not mean that one does not have to learn how to work with or around his fellow humans and their/our groups, because as others have pointed out, there are MORE of us than ever before and no real frontier we can escape to/start over in. “Misfits” in western culture in the past could come to the New World, then Go West, or North to Alaska. It is easier to go to these places than ever before, but now one finds an established world already there.

So what are some other reasons, oh master of the nebulous Ping Pong Tongue Proclamation.

“…there are probably more choices open to people now than ever before…”

You have probably been out West. You know, those vast tracks of federal/state owned lands where opportunity to develop is so, so easy. Those very lands which hold the key to the future energy independence of the U.S. The lands where no man can go,because of the whims of several “individualists” hikers and their friends in high places, who grant themselves dispensations, and who already have theirs.

D-White, loosen that state developed feel good collar around your pencil neck before it snaps. The “choices” are not open. Looks like someone tried to flush a Pick It down a low flow toilet. It’s now the clogged status quo that Pick It Fence But accepts as the norm.

…helping others or even humanity as a whole more than or as an inherent part of their individual accomplishments. On PJM, the meme is that people do this only to gain power over others…

Eh wot ?

Frankly, I think a lot of folks here spin their wheels griping about loss of individual rights, when actually there are probably more choices open to people now than ever before…

Frankly, our current version of a federal government is all about assaulting individual liberties (Obama’s “negative” liberties) in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those embedded values that thwart said government’s power grab.

Frankly, if “choices” means choosing from a wide array of Chinese manufactured crap at Wal-Mart or which ipad or iphone to acquire (or even which pre-fabricated cruise to take), all that hardly means much in comparison to human freedom.

Huxley’s mechanized subjects in Brave New World had copious “choices”, but there existed a very bright line at which choices stopped, cold turkey.

Somewhere between the absolute freedom of being able to buy land and do whatever I want with it to the other extreme that there is no land that I can buy at all…is the rub. Mr Lucky wants land to drill on and tanstaafl is concerned that our choice includes Chinese stuff. OK, I, too, want some reasonable response to China issues and a reasonable energy policy

Neither ML or Tan. wants to face the fact that some people oppose development of land because they value the land, not JUST because they are power hungry. They do not care for chromium-laced pools, where once there was a cactus plant. Yes, the people who finally make a living off preserving the wild turn it into their own business, with all the intendant initiatives and advertising hyperbole, which free marketeers love so much, when it is pushing their product, but not so much when it stands in their way.

And other tedious people, whom I referred to earlier, like to help others, make the world better, follow Jesus teachings, blah, blah, blah; none of which are at the top of my to do lists, but such inclinations do not make them evil, any more than you folks who mutter about the guvment all the time. You are both denizens of the planet we all find ourselves on. It’s just that you both have these (no doubt) heartfelt beleeefs about good and evil; who are the evil ones? Obviously, the people who elect candidates you don’t like, tax you at a level you can’t stand, start wars you abhor, or just generally outsmart or outmaneuver you.

…tanstaafl is concerned that our choice includes Chinese stuff…Neither ML or Tan. wants to face the fact that some people oppose development of land because they value the land, not JUST because they are power hungry…It’s just that you both have these (no doubt) heartfelt beleeefs about good and evil; who are the evil ones?

In the throes of typical liberal projection and assumption making, you missed the points.

FYI, the individuals that you support, the Kerrys, the Al Gores, the Obamas, the Billy Bob Clintons, the moronic Pelosis and Reids, all the yakkers and spielers (made up word, variation of spiel) on the planet are some of the biggest hypocrites on the planet when it comes to resources and land use.

You think Lisa Jackson and sundry cronies at the EPA has the least scientific understanding of land use, as opposed to simply being robotically agenda driven ?

Do you have even the slightest clue of how much of American taxpayers’ money is simply shot straight down the drain by Washington DC ? And you think they should get more of your money to dump ?

While we’re talking Dwight, what do you personally do for land preservation ?

There you go with your projection. I did not name any of those people as ones who I was including in the sincere concern for the environment list.

What do I do? Conserve water, electricity, and oil with various strategies, have the biggest compost pile I possibly can, grow hundreds of pounds of veggies,burn four to five cords of wood, and give a few hundred bucks to a local watershed protection group, Audubon Society etc.

Good for you Dwight, something you do that is concrete as opposed to nebulous support for national tyrants in Washington DC whose agenda of pure power is couched in concern and caring for “you” and/or “the environment”.

I always ask every liberal to give up driving and dispose of any petroleum containing or petroleum based products in their homes in the name of saving the planet. Also, to give up connectivity in terms of the internet and tv, that will help the planet as well.

I can’t grow much at 7300 feet with a very short growing season, but I am very aware that I share the land with the animals. I don’t like to do this, but some drought has turned watering deer and other critters into a very tedious job. They’d probably survive fine w/o me, but I feel a certain responsibility as human encroachment and human population growth decimates natural animal habitat around the world.

It is my idea that deforestation worldwide plays more of a role in shifting weather patterns than anything to do with so called man-made global warming.

According to Fromm, the identification with authoritarianism is a “mechanism of escape” from a feeling of personal insecurity and weakness. The “severed” personality attempts to overcome so crippling a condition by choosing to “give up his freedom” as a way of “eliminating the gap” between his individual self and the world he cannot come to terms with or enter as a productive participant. The lamentable result is “the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self.” And the choice is paid for “by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities,” another way of describing the totalitarian nightmare.

Simple, don’t need an ivory tower dissertaion to explain current crisis in America…”Rule of Law.” It applies equally to every American citizen (natural born or legally naturalized). Period.

America’s Constitution (and its guarantees), Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights (along with the Federalist Papers). That’s all We The People need. Simple.

How many pages were these three historic documents written on? 15 all told? Well, the Federalist Papers consumed reams, but aside from them. Sure, not A4, legal size or somewhere in between…point is America is unique because We The People don’t need continued gerrymandering of Our Founding Father’s original intent…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“Individual” or “collective?” Personal or Private property? Dancing around a pin head type of presentation. All this was hashed out in the colonial Continental Congress.

The “Napolionic Code” swept European countries and enacted in colonial USA…summarily rejected, with the above mentioned three documents. Easy.

It’s “individual” and his “God.” All, yes ALL God given Rights emanate from the Almighty. Period! Don’t have to slice it, nor dice it. God is the answer.

We The People understand this, its ivory tower types that reject this. God and each individual, a partnership in living life and salvation of mankind.

I have to say I’ve come to enjoy this author’s essays, despite their ridiculous overuse of difficult words (an affectation most people outgrow by the time they’re out of college), the uniformly long and complex sentences which put the reader to sleep, the piling of abstract terms and concepts that never get properly defined, the pretentious invocation of big names (“Toynbee said this,” “Spengler said that,” “St. Augustine said this,” “T.S. Eliot” said that,” etc. ad nauseum). It all makes for great comedy when read aloud!

Ron Paul’s strength in Iowa shows it’s too soon to write him off Though he has a large and loyal following, Ron Paul’s positions on key issues sets him apart from many Republicans. But he keeps moving steadily toward a position of strength in the early voting – especially in Iowa. By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer / November 20, 2011 http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/President/…

In a crucial essay, a half century ago, C. G. Jung wrote in vol 10, of his Collected Works, pars. 501-504, 1957:

“The moment the individual combines with the mass…he renders himself obsolete… robbed of his foundations and his dignity…responsibility is collectivized…the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in turn usurps the function of the real life carrier (only the individual carries life and meaning), …the individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social unit….and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The State is turned into a quasi-animate personality…whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea…only a camouflage for those who know how to manipulate it…specialized mouthpieces of State doctrine. (And when)…responsibility is delegated to a corporate body….(the individual) is on the way to State slavery.”

Which I assume was Jung’s fall-back position after getting a bit carried away with the pre-WWII German resurgence under Hitler, who was tapping into the collective unconscious and generating a lot of energy, which for a period of time was impressing a lot of people, not just Jung. The paradox of the beaten individuals finding energy within the collected group “worked” for a while, until it didn’t. But any time there is war, the masses are urged to be patriotic, support the stars and stripes, the Fatherland etc. In Vietnam, individuals who said “hell, no…” were castigated by the patriots, until the group of hell, noers got too large to dismiss (not that they still weren’t castigated). Righties and lefties like individuals if they are making decisions they approve of, but just as often they want them to join the group in some patriotic/socialistic collective effort.
Here’s a wild guess that if we had a Republican President doing essentially what Obama is doing, we would not be getting the glory of the individual talk from the right, but from the left. It all depends upon whose program we are supposed to be getting with, eh?

The death of the individual. From the EU to the rise of Obama and his gang to the “Occupy” “movement” to as simple as our cars looking pretty much like any other car (you can’t tell the difference), we are most definitely entering aan American “Dark Age.” No one thinks for themselves anymore. Gimme,gimme, gimmee this and that and they want YOU to pay for it. A 21st century adaptation of Communist ideals.

I agree with proreason #20, with his comment that the focus on the primacy of the individual is a recent development in human history.

That is because this conflict, if I may use the term, between the collective and the individual only emerges in a socioeconomic system that requires change.

First, our species is by nature collective. That is because our knowledge base, of how to live, is not genetically stored as it is in all other species. It is socially stored; that is, it must be learned-from-others. The medium of this knowledge is of course, language.

I disagree with truepeers #24 and his suggestion that ‘culture’ came into existence to sideline aggression. Since our species has no innate knowledge, then ‘culture’ or social knowledge must be developed as our species develops. Its function is to generate and store knowledge; nothing to do with aggression repression. And nothing to do with mystical connections of ‘pure essence’.

During human history, the majority of societal organization was tribal, which is to say, collectivist. The focus was on the stability of the group and the agenda was a no-growth stable society. This is valid both in the pre-tribal hunting and gathering systems, which were also no-growth, and in the larger non-migratory tribal food-producing systems. Individualism was repressed because variations in behavior destabilized rather than stabilized the society.

The west, alone, developed the privileging of the individual. This is because Western Europe’s ecological reality, its biome, is the richest ecology for agriculture on the planet: moderate temperature, regular rainfall, rich soil, plenty of animals and plants to domesticate. There is no ecology like it elsewhere on the planet. This led to consistent increases in population. But, as long as the technology and ideology remained static, the economy could not produce enough food and health care for the exploding populations. Results would be famines, plagues, wars.

Finally, – and it took several centuries – the rigid top-down ideology which posited that no individual had the ability or right to reason, to dissent, to question – began to waver. Individualism began to emerge with questions, doubt, exploration of the material world – and this required individuals who dared-to-doubt. With this change, came an explosion of new technology, new approaches to farming, to travel, to health care…and the populations began to rise and sustain themselves.

That is, the individul is vital in a growth economy. In a no-growth economy, individuals are repressed because the focus is on No Change. When the focus is on change, to accomodate increasing population needs, you will get a demand for dissent, peripheral thinking, questions.

Surely you don’t think “knowledge” has no underlying ethical purpose or motivation? Of course, if knowledge is collective it must have. And what motivates the human ethical quest if not the threat of human-on-human violence? As for the individual, if he is solely a creation of modern times, if he is not a working out of a possibility or dynamic inherent in the very origin of humanity, then any explanation you offer for his miraculous appearance will ultimately be in the “it came from outer space” genre. I know Europe can seem weird sometimes, but really….

None of which is to deny that the historical odds against the appearance of the modern individual were probably long. The Judeo-Christian tradition from which he spawns really is the key to undertanding him, however.

I don’t agree that knowledge has an innate ethics, and to state that IF knowledge is a collective function, THEN, it must be ethical, is illogical.
After all, language and other symbolic notations are obviously a collective function but there is no ethical value to them.

And I don’t agree that the threat of human violence is a basic axiom and thus, ’causes’ ethics. I think that ethics, as a conscious action, is a particular component of our species’ capacity for reason and that this is a necessary bonding factor – because we lack the bonds of genetic knowledge and so, must create out knowledge base. Our knowledge base is shared, ie, collective, and this sharing is the basic axiom of ethics. Not the threat of violence.

The individual is not a creation. After all, since our species has the capacity for reason and lacks genetic knowledge, then, each person must ‘absorb’ (and thus could fail to absorb or follow) the collective knowledge base. The tendency to ‘be an individual’ is as innate as the tendency to be a member of the collective.

The focus is: which actor does the society privilege? The questioner or the follower? The individual or the groupie? In no-growth societies, there are constant repressions of individualism – peer, family, customs, dogma, threats. For most of human history, no-growth societies were functional. But again, the Western European biome enabled a consistent and large growth of populations, and this required technological innovations – and thus – individual free thought.
I suggest you look up some texts on Ecological Anthropology and expand your focus beyond the unverified axioms of Generative Anthro.

And there is nothing unusual in the appearance of the individual as societally dominant. As I said, our species is, as a species, capable of reason, symbolic analysis and logical modelling; these are individual acts carried out within an informational community. So, both the individual and the collective are basic components of our species. The difference then moves to: which is privileged by the society? And – when the economy needs technological innovation to increase economic production, then, the individual is privileged.

As for the Judeo-Christian ideology, the former is a tribal, no-growth ideology, focused around maintaining stability and peace within a collective. ALL no-growth societies will have that same ideology. The latter is a growth ideology, focused around enabling different tribes/peoples interact, trade and get along with each other.

ETAB, If I may add, Isaiah Berlin points out that there was a foundational change in philosophy in Athens, in the ideas of the polis, it’s structure and purpose. From the paternalistic concepts of Plato, thru the more flexible approach of Aristotle, and finally the recognition of a nascent individualism, such as in Epictetus and the Stoics. More so the person was seen as an end in himself.
Your point on Christianity is well taken, the idea of individual sanctity, sin, responsibility, salvation, the whole complex of a person, emerged most vibrantly in this faith.
As for the State, an old individualist named Albert jay Nock said it best, looked at from any perspective, down thru time, it is indistiguishable from a “professional criminal class”.

johnt – yes, that was quite a change in Athens. From the utopian totalitarianism of Plato to the humanist realism of Aristotle. I recommend Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ for a thorough analysis of Plato (and Hegel and Marx) and their totalitarian ideologies. [Though I disagree with him on Aristotle; he seems to align Aristotle with Plato and the two are polar opposites.]

Yes, it’s quite remarkable to analyze the Christian ideology for its societal functions. Not its metaphysical but its societal; that is, what would be the results in an economic community if you followed the Christian axioms of ‘how do we interact with ourselves and others’? It’s equally fascinating to consider the Judaic and the Islamic using this analytic perspective. My view is that these religious ideologies are always based within economic and societal realities.

And yes, the notion of individual sin, intentionality, responsibility and redemption, is a key aspect of the Christian perspective. A basic strength.

As for the state, well, since we are also necessarily communal beings, because our knowledge base is learned rather than genetic, it’s a necessary evil so to speak. Our task is to enable the state/govt to keep us as a coherent community without giving it the ability to smother and repress our individuality. Not an easy task. I consider the US Constitution one of the key documents that sets up such a positive structure and am concerned as are so many, of the growth of ‘progressive statism’ and the ‘entitlement population’ that sidelines the Constitution.

Well, I don’t know if there is much to be gained by carrying this further but you can write me @gmail if you think so. I’ll just note for now (and once again) that we see things quite differently.

YOu write:
“After all, language and other symbolic notations are obviously a collective function but there is no ethical value to them.”

-I think if you ever become interested in the question of the origin of language, recognizing it as something qualitatively different from animal communications systems, and thus asking how it could have come into Being, you will have to entertain the possibility that, along with the religious ritual, language began not as a way of making unproblematic referential or declarative statements about the world, but as a way of modelling human reciprocity under a sacred order of Being. In the primitive world, signs and invocations are full of social or ethical/religious significance, and to a lesser degree they still carry that ostensive and imperative import today.

You are much in line with the Western metaphysical tradition which, from Plato to Wittgenstein, has founded itself on a refusal to question the origins of language, so as to assert an ideal use of declarative language as unproblematic or transparent; but philosophy is not anthropology. The latter requires of us an interest not merely in the content, but in the form, of language, something that cannot be “explained” by assuming language just “naturally” and silently evolved out of the animal world. The human really is a break in time and all language recapitulates that break by creating a time or space for “off-line” processing where the immediacy of our worldly rivalry for appetitive objects is deferred by sending us to dwell in a transcendent domain of representations.

“I think that ethics, as a conscious action, is a particular component of our species’ capacity for reason”

-Reason is not something universal, in the sense that people in different cultures “reason” differently. And the reason for that is that reason is secondary to the religious/sacred/ethical/revelatory foundations of any society. Reason is a way of working through the meaning of the sacred (ritualized) events which found a society and the paradoxes, inherent in the events, of how some kind of transcendent and re-membered meaning has emerged from the experience of life in “real time”.

“As for the Judeo-Christian ideology, the former is a tribal, no-growth ideology, focused around maintaining stability and peace within a collective. ALL no-growth societies will have that same ideology. The latter is a growth ideology, focused around enabling different tribes/peoples interact, trade and get along with each other.”

-Do you not think that there is something peculiar in this “tribe” whose religion/culture is mostly the product of a diaspora in which a shared Jewish identity was maintained across thousands of miles in many small communities, with little political power, that, at their most self-aware, constituted something like a global network? What’s tribal about that? To my mind, Jewishness is something quite different – a national high culture founded by a revelation into the universality of our shared human origins. What you see as “tribal” is merely the necessity that any revelation into what is universally human has a “privileged” discoverer and keeper, a firstness which those who come later to share in the revelation potentially resent.

And how do you explain the success of the Jews, as individuals, in the modern world if their culture is merely tribal, a modernity that has flummoxed and buried countless tribes and related forms of cognition? I think that when one turns from resentment of Jewish culture to admiration, it becomes possible to see that significant parts of the modern world entail a globalization of Jewishness (and Christianity in different respects). Many thinkers in early modern and modern European history have been aware of this. But I’m not going on at further length here about this; if anyone wants to consider the possibility with an open mind they can contact me at the above name@gmail.

true peers, we will continue to disagree. I reject all of your basic axioms which are taken, as you yourself have said, from Giraud and Gans and their Generative Anthropology.

I’ve done a fair bit of research, publishing and teaching in communication and language and conclude that the origin of human language is outside of any empirical evidence. I reject that it evolved ‘out of the animal world’; our species is unique in its processing of information. But I certainly reject that language functions to deal with ‘human reciprocity under a sacred order of Being’. After all, to posit such a notion requires that you first have an idea of a ‘sacred order of Being’. And that image itself requires a modelling capacity that first requires…language. The Gen Anthro analysis is a catch 22 situation and is purely speculative and without any evidentiary proof.

Language in my view functions to define, store and communicate information about the self and the Other. The Other includes the immediate external world and also, both the atemporal and historical experiences. Nothing to do with any essentialist bond with a metaphysical force. The fact that our knowledge is defined and stored within language means that we, alone of all species, have the capacity to change our knowledge base and thus, change how we interact with the world.

With regard to judaic tribalism, I think you misunderstand the term ‘tribal’. It doesn’t mean premodern technology but a mode of societal organization that is focused on the collective self-sufficiency as a people. That doesn’t mean that the people in such a tribe cannot be, scientifically and intellectually, modern. So, I disagree with your outline.

I also disagree with your view that people in different cultures ‘reason’ differently. Our species, no matter the culture, have the same capacity for reason. However, our knowledge base is different in each culture. A knowledge base is not the same as the capacity for reason. Our capacity for reason means that we can change our knowledge base and so, can move from viewing an evil eye as the cause of disease to viewing germs as their cause.

I consider societies as logical adaptations to ecological realities; their beliefs/behavior function as developed normative habits within these constraints – and the basic constraints or independent variables are: food production capacities in that ecology and population size capacities in that ecology and within that food production system.

Diamond’s books are better, although he ignores population size but he does consider ecological constraints. There are other ecological references. And I don’t think that our species has a ‘history’ in the sense of a linear development as a species. I think that societies, or more accurately, knowledge bases, have a history, and that history is that with increases in population size as related to food production capacities, societies become more complex in organization – and to enable success, the knowledge bases become more ‘factual’ and real rather than imaginary and essentialist. That is, it is dysfunctional to rely on the gods to produce food; it is more practical to build a water reservoir and irrigate your fields.

Well, even the most scientifically-advanced and globalized culture needs religion. Hence AGW, which is surely a religious movement even if the science that validates and helps sustain it turns out to be good and Mother Nature warmingly complies. AGW is global, and as such bonds the species and hence gives it a history, however (un) “linear” or multi-threaded or accordion- and slinky-like we might imagine it. What do you think of the anthropological school of “Science Studies” in the vein of Bruno Latour (“We have never been modern”)?

true peers – AGW is an ideology, and has similarities to religious ideology in that its axioms are based on faith not science, but I wouldn’t call it a religion. It’s essentially a political-economic movement, labeled as science but hidden within an ideology with religious overtones, i.e., you aren’t supposed to question its axioms. I reject its axioms by the way. But I don’t consider that it gives humans as a species, a history as a species. Do we consider accepting dogma as science to be evidence of our historical development as a species?

And I’m not a fan of Latour either. I disagree with the postmodern view of language, nature/nurture etc. And can’t stand Griemas.

Actually, when you were posting ecological prophecies (and yes, to my mind they did have a religious quality about them) about the future of Islamic societies at Belmont Club, I tended to agree with much of what you wrote. Which is why I thought it might be worth trying to further the anthropological arguments which underpin your predictions. No such luck!

Anyway, what is your understanding of a religion, of religion’s emergence, form, and purpose in the worldly world? As for the histories that AGW can give us, I’d say the options are wide open. But for starters you can listen to any green bemoan the evolution and shared failures of human society(ies) to this point. Of course whether one favours some return to a more primitive “order” and hence drastically-reduced human population and an end to globalization, or salvation through some high-tech Utopia, the green narrative or “reason” tells the story of the transcendent sign’s (“AGW”) emergence, while never being able to fully exhaust the meanings attending the sign’s emergence, leaving the sundry origins (in science and political economy) of that sign’s emergence as something of a religious and historical mystery, a question for further scientific exploration and thinking about all the unreformed humans who didn’t get it quickly or who still don’t get it yet.

true peers – heh, no, I wasn’t making ecological prophecies but ‘predictions’ about the future of modern Islamic societies – based on the independent variables of: population size, economic capacity to support this population, urban/rural locations, global networking.

As for religion, all societies have developed religion, understanding religion as a means for explaining the metaphysical, i.e., the non-physical continuity of life. This does not mean developing a monotheism (one god) or even polytheism (many gods); you can get by with spirits and non-physical spirits and forces. But, the fact that life is continuous in the collective and yet finite in the individual singularity – every people have to explain this.

Religion can also be used to explain the reality of chance, both good and bad luck so to speak.

As for your comments about AGW as a transcendental sign, with its meanings never fully articulated – heh- that’s pure Platonism with its Ideal Form and inadequate material versions of this Form. I adamantly reject Platonism; I’m an Aristotelian; there is no Ideal Form separate from matter/mass.

Recognizing that all language is transcendent (the significance of signs or words is not reducible to their physical existence as a collection of letters or sounds or body language) does not make one Platonic. Again, the difference is between the Platonic worship of the idea, i.e. the putative philosophical content of the sign, and the anthropological interest in the form of the sign as a sacralizing agent that helps bond a community on a shared scene: e.g., is the sign a philosophical concept, the name of a god/spirit in a tribal ritual, or the mark of an unquestionable imperative “the science is settled and we must reduce carbon [or we are acting like Holocaust deniers]” in a postmodern victimary religion.

I think your definition of religion is a good starting point but then your last sentence suggests you don’t quite grasp how meaning is continuous in the collective whose domain is that of representations that transcend their materiality – e.g. you can’t well explain a painting in terms of a collection of paint blotches.

true peers – no, I wouldn’t call meaning in language ‘transcendent’, which is an unfortunate term with its implications of its own internal powers of Will. The meaning in language is ‘symbolic’. [I'm a Peircean semiotician].

As for meaning being ‘continuous’ in a collective, of course it is (Check out Peirce’s ‘Thirdness’). After all, the knowledge base of our species is collective and continuous within the community. It has to be since our knowledge isn’t genetic but learned. So, ‘normative habits’ emerge and develop in a community, dealing with ‘how to live’ and ‘what makes the world tick’.

-I’m not saying you have to be a believer in divinity. But you should recognize that language has all the qualities conventially ascribed to divinity. It is the quality of our collective Being on shared communal scenes of exchange that transforms our horizontal existence of appetitive life into something vertical or transcendent. Where does language reside? You can’t point to anywhere in the brain or in any material domain where words reside. We grasp the word and its significance when many neurons fire to associate letters or sounds or body language, and in doing so we access an imaginative domain that is truly beyond the material.

Because the way that happens is something we can never fully explain, though it does happen, it may have the appearance to some of “internal powers of Will”. But I think we do better to say that it is precisely because the historical process, which is a process of exchanging signs on shared scenes, is not controlled by any one person’s will – because history is not some kind of conspiracy of power or knowlege – that for those who still need to believe there is someone controlling the “invisible hand” in history there is a tendency to invoke some extra-human will. But I think we should be suspicious of all theories that invoke any human or divine will to power. The mystery is that transcendence occurs without any evident will controlling it, other than the unconscious will, or the mysterious divinity, that is shared, in part, by all participants and rivals on the human scene. This is why the Jews, in recognizing that their God was also the universal Being of all humanity, recognizing that the Jews were but a light unto the other nations, transcended tribalism, the implications of which we are still working through.

To witness the progression of Modern Man into the civilized society it has advanced into, one must travel the world and experience the enclaves and compounds of ancient clans and ethnic groups that have been built to house and protect those clans and groups from being savagely eradicated. (This cannot be accomplished on the internet). America is just such an enclave.
America has been founded on a set of ethics and values that promote and reward individual pursuit. That very basis for individuality is being defrauded by the entity that was formed to protect the pursuit of individuality; The governing body.
That governing body is devolving into a beast that has outgrown it’s cage. It’s demanding to be fed at a rate the governed cannot sustain. It has become the enemy of the governed. It has discarded the ethics and values that it was founded on.
The governing authority has enacted law that entitles specified groups rewards for membership in that group, thereby placing anyone outside any of these groups at a societal disadvantage. This is one of the main causes of the deterioration of the pursuit of individuality.
According to evolving American law, the rewards of the group are more valuable than the individual. (This should be an obvious tenet of the current “administration”).
The only thing left for an individual to pursue, is to decide which group is most advantageous to combine with in order to simplify their life, and not be considered an evil individualist.

The force of the leftist Collective is powerful and destructive to the parental teachings for Individualism. My offspring and his beautiful European mate complain “the state or government or someone should pay for all medical bills” as they are faced with paying only 10% of a $10,000 medical bill. Their income exceeds $150,000 per year, they drink fine wine, enjoy home ownership and every electronic gadget they can get their hands on. I have obviously failed in my parenting efforts. I am sad but perhaps not alone ?

Indeed! The hypocrisy and ugliness and “1984″ in spades in the Obama administration sweeping our country, absorbing many into an undifferentiated glob, is so dangerous we will in many ways suffer horrifically — and would hardly know it — until it’s perhaps too late. Resistance to this organized, robotic, amoral collective can only be challenged by those who are as well organized in their individuality as the collective itself. With many dark forces from within our own personal selves as well as the glaring dark forces collectively emerging about us, developing our consciousness toward truth, reason, empathy, love, and fierce unyielding principles where need be, will not be easy. No, you are not alone MilesToGo. I understand, (and so does R. Frost!)

I’ll tell you all what to do, do what I am about to do.
MAKE XEROX COPIES of this article as many as you can carry and LEAVE THEM AROUND CAMPUSES in your area.

You can leave them in boxes labelled “Free Mind Food” or “important free study material.”
SOMEBODY is bound to read a couple of them.
This is TOO GOOD to languish here as a coal to Newcastle.
PEOPLE MUST BE EXPOSED TO THESE THOUGHTS AND REFERENCES outside of this select brainy Breitbart group.